Starting in the early 1990s, many Orthotic and Prosthetic (O&P) care professionals saw trends that pointed to a rapid increase in the population of amputees due mainly to longer life spans of existing amputees and an increasing number of people facing risk factors that lead to amputations. Those trends led to the desire for computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) to help the practitioners reduce time spent on patient care, while increasing the quality of that care. Before CAD/CAM became commonplace in the industry, practitioners relied on labor-intensive methods involving plaster casts and heavy plaster models that resulted in patients often waiting weeks for new sockets.
Vendors providing CAD/CAM worked with practitioners to develop effective systems and methods for socket sizing. Popular CAD software available today requires the use of scanning devices to digitize patient residual limb dimensions. These devices include rotating digitizers, tactile tracing pens, laser scanners, and digital cameras. Such devices, while often creating a highly accurate digital representation of the residual limb, could potentially create errors undetectable and out of the control of the practitioner. In addition, the costs involved with using CAD devices are often prohibitive, especially when calculating the high costs in dollars and time spent learning the CAD design techniques.
Thus, there is a need in the art to provide lower cost alternatives to prosthesis fitting practitioners, while continuing to utilize software in designing prosthetic components to be custom fabricated. This need, along with others, is satisfied by the present invention.